Woods and squirrels

This week has been a lot of internal work interspersed with more fun outside work, but no workparties. The internal stuff included meeting the new boss Colin for the first time (a bit scary) and a regular catch up with the communications team to plan the comms work on our land for the next few months. There was also some hard brain work with colleagues on our developing strategic plan.

Rusland woods plan

Not to imply my colleagues are not fun, but the fun outdoor stuff included meeting our Forestry Commission local officer Andy in our Rusland woods to talk about the Woodland Management Plan we have been working up with our consultant Ed Mills. Andy is the chap who will sign the plan off and it was really good to meet him on site and talk him through some of the issues the woods face and all the exciting work we want to do there in the next 10 years. The work includes rainforest restoration to make the woods more diverse and resilient.

We will shortly be submitting our plan to Andy and hopefully he will give us the green light to go ahead within a few weeks. This will include the felling licences we need to do some thinning work and remove some invasive trees. It may also lead us to an application for a Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier woodland scheme, the first we will ever have had. This would be a ten year scheme to carry on the restoration work we have started.

Friday at Dam Mire

Friday is set to be a really fun day as we have our community open day at Dam Mire (pictured above). The day is packed, starting with sessions with the children from Threlkeld School who, among other things, will be helping us make some monster bug hotels. They are way off the scale of the small one foot square one we put up a few years ago,. Here we are thinking big and I mean pallet sized…

We then have craft and other activities for the public, a general walk and talk to explain how we got the site and what we have done and will be doing with it; a geology walk led by expert, Friends member and local resident Mike Hambrey, and after a bit of food, a night time bat walk led by bat expert Cath. We are also planning to open the eye seat and new bridge (see my last blog for details of the seat).

Investment in protected places

In the outside world, the environmental sector has been disappointed by Labour’s lack of support for environmental issues since they got into power and there are rumours of the possible abolishment of many crucial environmental laws. Add to that the impacts of a hot summer and drought which have taken their toll and which highlight that many parts of the countryside need to be more resilient to climate change impacts.

New research commissioned by Wildlife and Countryside Link reveals that annual investment in protected nature sites needs to increase from around £1.1 billion today to approximately £2 billion to restore England’s protected places by 2042, the deadline for key Environment Act nature targets. This investment would also help deliver 30 by 30 – the commitment to protect and effectively manage 30% of England’s land and sea for nature by 2030.

England’s protected places, such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, National Landscapes, and National Parks, have the potential to be the crown jewels of a thriving landscape – places where wildlife flourishes and people can experience nature at its best. But decades of underinvestment, pollution and intensive industry have left too many habitats damaged and wildlife disappearing.

With the right protection and investment, these places could once again become the thriving heart of nature’s recovery across England and help keep our country safe from climate risks. So 50 leading environmental charities have written to Andy Burnham asking that the tide turn from destruction to recovery. They emphasise that restoring nature is essential for public health, economic resilience, and national security, as well as for the future of wildlife. Government must stop damaging activities in protected places, invest in their recovery, and unlock the public and private finance needed to meet 30 by 30.

Red squirrels in the woods

Next week sees our woodland workparties restarting, always very popular as people love woods and working in them. We have been doing some work thinking about red squirrels in our woods recently. In addition to the great support we have at Grasmere from their red squirrel group, we are delighted that in future we will be doing more work with the Westmorland Red Squirrel group and their volunteers covering the Staveley area (Mike’s Wood) and Ambleside (Greenbank and Sweden Woods).

All the volunteers work tirelessly to try and reduce the impacts of grey squirrels on our native red squirrels, and to try and maintain or create areas of red strongholds. The longer term plan is to support reds, once the greys have been pushed back, through food supplement, local ecology and perhaps a reds enclosure where they can be protected, breed, develop and subsequently be released into the local area.

Jim from the Ambleside group sent us a really interesting newsletter which told us all squirrels took to the trees to eat hazel nuts a couple of weeks ago – by early sept they were feeding on the beech trees and will move onto oaks once the acorns are ready. Some squirrel experts say that the squirrels will return to feeders next spring; others believe it will be sooner because we have had a very early crop of nuts and berries given the dry, warm summer.

Our shop is now open

We have a series of landscape gifts at Friends whereby you can help pay for work for red squirrels, for example. Our online shop has been down whilst we have swapped to a new website but the good news is it is now back! Visit the shop here to buy cards, calendars and those landscape gifts.

First up on the schedule of woodland workparties is Greenbank Wood in Ambleside for a day of hard work. During the winter we had some sizeable, again think big, limbs chopped off the veteran beech trees for safety reasons. We have not had a workparty to do a bit of a clear up since and there is a lot of clearing up to do. We also may have a forest of sycamore regeneration to remove. So if you like outdoor work and mud, this is the one for you. Just dig out your saw and loppers and book on here.

Meanwhile if you fancy helping out Plantlife by reporting waxcap sightings this autumn, have a look at Waxcap Watch: Survey Britain’s Grassland Fungi.